>Jane:
>"The various laws are
>almost straight out of the Black Book of Carmarthen and similar texts."
I wrote most of the Statutes of Malan, which appeared as the law codes in Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe, while stuck in an airport lounge near Newcastle (Oz). I'd previously been reading and taking notes from Welsh triads (full marks Jane) and the Laws of Manu (surprisingly, Indian, but then my use of analogues is seldom direct). I definitely was trying to evoke the form of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon law as captured in Beowulf, coupled with spirit of the early Welsh and Irish law codes, with their lingering archaic weirdness and avoidance of too direct a rationality.
James:
>well indeed into Icelandic law (for
>instance, the way outlawry works).
Pretty much pan-Northern Europe from at least the fifth century on.
>feud in Barbarian Adventures, for instance, are taken directly from sagas,
>like the horse-fight and the goad and so forth, which IIRC is from Njals
>Saga.
Yes, Ian Cooper has made great use of these as inspirations. And added a uniquely Gloranthan feel as well. Rug throwing, etc. Jest brilliant. :)
>The geography is very Icelandic, with the addition of a couple of
>towns -- but Sartar doesn't even really have villages, which is Iceland all
>over.
I think there are probably more, mixed clan, not-quite-a-tula villages in Sartar than the published sources give credit for. Nothing in the 'real' world is ever as pure or unmixed as our conceptual models suggest, whether its notions of kinship or where and how people live. And most rpgs, for very good reasons, can only provide short 'template' type summaries of what will in reality be very complex situations. For most of our storytelling of course, this can be quite safely ignored. But there's something very C20 Western about a notion of interlocked, discretely bounded tulas and pure unmixed clans.
>So while there are Irish or Welsh elements, I don't think it's possible to
>say that the Heortling culture is predominantly one or the other
Exactly. Analogues are helpful in opening the imagination, but they always fall short. In naming any analogue, you also have to be explicit about what it *doesn't* model. Iceland, frr instance, had no notion of clans, which is pretty central to most Heortling concepts and absolutely pivotal to Heortling law. And Iceland's own radical experiments in law almost led to the extinction of the Island's population in just a few centuries - hardly a model for a self-sustaining system that has endured thousands of years.
>, partly
>because it's such a mishmash and partly because the RW cultures influenced
>each other and were similar to each other.
And because we see the past and other cultures through lens of our own grinding. And because Glorantha has a different magical (and indeed physical) ecology. Gods and feats and non-human technologies are always going to make a *big* difference even if people still dress in plaided pants and wave swords at strangers.
Heortling culture is Heortling culture. We've collectively imagined a system that works according to its own laws genre, and unique mythologic. And rather than being a virtual world model where everything is computed and mapped down to the last bit, its always been primarily an evocation and a background for stories and games, so there's a tolerance (indeed a necessity) for a range of personal variation, and a healthy capacity for the varied demands of drama, genre, poetry, duck banditry and Humakti Death Song Berserk. Add Greg''s wonderful way of using 'historical' sources to evoke but not to direct - there's always *something* wrong or inaccurate therein - and we have a highly cohesive and evocative descriptive matrix with lots of campaign freedom built in as well.
Cheers
John
Powered by hypermail